As reported by The Daily Caller, a government source said that Cody Shearer was attempting to peddle dirt on Trump two months earlier than other reporting suggested.

But government officials did not take much of what Shearer — a former journalist — was saying seriously because he was “not a guy with a whole lot of credibility,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of investigations into the various Trump-Russia investigations.

Nevertheless, the info Schearer was peddling made it up the chain and into the hands of “Trump dossier” author and former British spy Christopher Steele.

The DC’s Chuck Ross noted further:

The House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees are investigating the so-called “Shearer memo” and how it made its way from the Clinton operative, through the State Department, and into the hands of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the infamous dossier.

Steele subsequently passed along some of the information to the FBI in October 2016, The Guardian first reported Jan. 30.

That was about the time the FBI was attempting for a second time to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant against Trump campaign official Carter Page. The bureau had initially sought a warrant over the summer of 2016 but that application was rejected.

Subsequent reporting noted that FBI agents held up the dossier as legitimate intelligence in October 2016 — not as political opposition research — when they were successful in obtaining a warrant to spy on Page. Those reports were confirmed in the “FISA memo” — a four-page summary of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into alleged “Trump-Russia collusion” that was released last week.

“Shearer’s involvement in digging up Trump dirt is one of the stranger twists in the saga of the Russia investigation, one that involves a recently retired State Department official named Jonathan Winer,” Ross reported, adding:

During the presidential campaign, Winer, who served at the time as special envoy to Libya, obtained information from Steele in summer 2016. He passed it along to then-Sec. of State John Kerry in the form of a two-page memo.

The Atlantic and The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Shearer’s information made its way to Steele through at least two intermediaries.

Shearer obtained information from an unidentified foreign source who then provided the information to his longtime friend and fellow Clinton crony, Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal then provided the information to Winer, his friend.

Steele provided the FBI with a handwritten memo based upon information from Shearer, according to The Atlantic. The note also reportedly referenced Shearer’s association with Blumenthal and disclosed that the information was unverified.

The Shearer memo and the Steele dossier contain some of the same unverified allegations.

The basic information contained in Schearer’s memo was that Russia’s spy agency, the FSB, had video footage of Trump engaging in sex acts with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

Steele and Schearer run in similar circles of friends but Steele, a former spy with connections to the FBI and CIA, has a better reputation. That’s likely why the FBI did not vet his dossier before using it to obtain a FISC warrant against Page — a violation of rules.